A surge in enrollment for public assistance has forced Riverside County officials in recent months to add more than $10 million to the budget for the Department of Public Social Services.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Feb. 5 added $4.4 million in contingency funds to social services’ budget, which stood at roughly $1 billion entering this fiscal year. That’s on top of $6 million added to the budget in December, bringing the total infusion to $10.4 million for the fiscal year ending June 30.

Most of that money will come from federal and state sources. About $42 million of Riverside County’s social services’ budget comes from county government.

The extra money was needed to cover changes to the county’s “General Relief” program, which is run by social services, county spokeswoman Brooke Federico said. To satisfy state law, the program helps indigent adults with no other means of support, such as unemployment insurance or Social Security, according to an April 2018 county staff report.

Several groups representing indigent adults wrote the county in late 2017 to point out what they saw as shortcomings in the program, the report read. The changes, made after meetings between the advocacy groups and county lawyers, included expanding who was eligible for the program and boosting the maximum payout to recipients from $291 to $326 a month.

After the changes, which were unanimously approved by supervisors, the program’s caseload jumped from 102 cases in June to 3,876 cases last month.

Social services normally doesn’t need extra money in its budget, which is part of the county’s overall $5.6 billion spending plan. It’s not uncommon for public safety departments, including the sheriff, district attorney and public defender, to project shortfalls that are bridged before the fiscal year ends.

In recent years, the budget has been challenged by a series of new, ongoing, and inflexible expenses that outpace revenue growth. These include hundreds of millions of dollars in pension obligations and costs associated with improving jail inmate health care to satisfy a lawsuit settlement and to partially staff an expanded jail being built in Indio.

Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper before love and the quest for snowless winters took him in 2007 to Southern California, where he started out covering Temecula for The Press-Enterprise. Today, Jeff writes about Riverside County government and regional politics. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.